Steve Cropper: The Royale Treatment

The MGs in a promo shot for their 1970
album, McLemore Avenue, which Booker
Jones reportedly
intended as an homage to
the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Photo courtesy of
the Stax Museum of American
Soul Music

But anyway, I continued on, and I
shined shoes. I mowed other people’s
yards, set bowling pins. I did whatever I
could to make a quarter or 50 cents, and
raised 17 dollars. That’s how much the
Silvertone flattop, round-hole guitar was
in the catalog. I had my mom help me
order it, and I had my 17 dollars and I
waited there on Saturday, because they
were going to deliver it on Saturday. I
sat on that front porch till my butt got
raw. Finally, here comes the Sears truck
around the corner, and I’m going nuts.
They brought it in a box—no case, a cardboard
box. They pulled it off the truck
and brought it up to the front porch—I
couldn’t wait to get in there to see this
thing. They said, “That’ll be a 25-cent
delivery fee.” Nobody had said that! It
wasn’t in the catalog. They didn’t tell me
that on the order form. I thought delivery
was free, and I go, “Mom!” [Laughs.] So
Mom always said if she hadn’t lent me the
quarter that day, I’d never have been a guitar
player. That’s her claim to fame.

Eventually, your dad bought your first
electric guitar, and you started playing
locally. I read that you took lessons from
a local player named Lynn Vernon.

Lynn was a great player, a great jazz player
and a good teacher. I took, I think, about
three paid lessons from him—three or four.
It wasn’t expensive by today’s standards,
but they were expensive then. A true story:
He opened the page to the music and said,
“Okay, play this,” and then he played. Then
he listened while I played it, and he goes, “I
knew it—you’re not reading the notes. You’re
playing what I just played.” I said, “Dang,
I got caught,” you know! I thought he was
going to kill me, but he didn’t. He said, “I’ll
tell you what you do. Why don’t you get
three or four of your favorite records or songs
you want to learn, and bring them next time.
I’ll teach them to you.” One of them was
“Walk, Don’t Run” by the Ventures. I think
the other one was part of the solo stuff in
“Honky Tonk,” from Bill Doggett’s record.
And it all started from there.

Later, Charlie Freeman [a friend with
whom Cropper started the Mar-Keys] was
taking lessons at Lynn Vernon’s. I would go
home and get my guitar, walk to his house,
and be sitting on his front porch when he
got home, waiting to download what he
had been taught that day. The benefit was
twofold. One was, Charlie had somebody
to work and rehearse with, and it caused me
to learn a little more rhythm to play behind
what he was doing—because Charlie was
more of a jazz-solo guy. He would teach
me the chords that he’d learned that day. I
would play the rhythm chords and he’d start
playing solo stuff, so we became a team. I
didn’t want to learn a lot of jazz stuff—I
just wanted to do, you know, rock and roll
songs and stuff like that, which we did.

What do you think you brought to the
guitar intuitively?

Well, I don’t know if I helped the instrument
any [laughs]. I just used it a little
differently. I learned that, in music—kind
of like in golf—less is more. I don’t know
how it was across the country, but I know
how it was in Memphis, Tennessee, on sessions:
The more you played, the less they
liked it. Most sessions—at least in the
rock ’n’ roll or R&B stuff—were all “head
arranged.” There were no charts. You could
do what you wanted to do as long as you
didn’t get in the way of what was going on,
like the singer and all that. So I learned
very early to play less and get out of the
way. And now they talk about it and say,
“Wasn’t he brilliant? He left all these holes.”
[Laughs.] Usually the holes were left because
I wanted to keep the job that I had, and the
other times it was because I couldn’t think
of anything to put in there! Simple seemed
to be the better way to go.

That’s all changed today—everybody is
stepping on everybody. It changed in L.A.
25, 30 years ago. When you’d go to a session,
there would be four or five other guitar players
on the date and I’d wonder, “What the
hell is this all about?” The reason there was
one guitar player on most of the Stax early
hits is because they could only afford one
guitar player, and I was willing to work for
15 dollars a session. Other people weren’t.

Once you started working at Stax, you did
much more than play guitar on sessions.
People say you worked very hard. Can
you describe your mindset at the time?

Cropper’s first solo album, 1971’s With a Little
Help from My Friends, was all-instrumental—just
as the MGs’ had been.

I saw it as something that had to be done.
As far as work ethic, I was just on automatic
pilot. I knew that you couldn’t sit in the studio
or sit at home and get airplay. So I teamed up
with one of the local distributors and got to be
friends with a guy named Bill Biggs. He used
to get in his car with boxes of records and call
on the jukebox operators. While he was calling
on those guys, I would have him drop me
off at the radio station and I’d find a station
manager or the program manager or the local
disc jockey that was on the air, and say, “Hey,
I’m Steve Cropper from Stax in Memphis, and
we’ve got this new record. I’d like for you to
hear it, and if you like it, maybe you’ll play it
for us.” I hit all of the major cities within 150
miles of Memphis. With “Green Onions,” Bill
and I went all the way to Texarkana [Texas]
and back. We hit Fort Smith and Little
Rock and Texarkana and made the rounds.
We went down next week into Tupelo and
Jackson, Mississippi, then Jackson, Tennessee,
and made that circle. Within a week and a
half, we’d saturated the market with “Green
Onions.” New York Atlantic got wind of this
and went, “This is the hottest friggin’ record
since . . . Get it out!”

How did you connect with Booker T. Jones?

I asked around. I said, “We need a keyboard
player,” and they said, “Oh, go check
out Booker T.” He was still 15 or barely
16, but he could really play. What I didn’t
know was that he played everything—bass,
baritone sax . . . he was taking trombone
in school. He was a great musician and still
is—one of the best in the world.

I remember the day I went to his
house—it was so strange. I knocked on
the door. His mom comes to the door, and
I said, “Is Booker home?” and she said,
“Yeah, he’s back in the den. I’ll show you.”
Didn’t question me or ask, “What’s this
white kid doing on my front porch?” She
just assumed Booker knew me. I go back in
the den and he’s sitting on the couch, playing
the guitar. I’m going, Wait a minute—
what’s wrong with this picture? I’m here to ask
him to come and play keyboards!

Booker brought up when I was working
up front in the record shop before I knew
him. He said, “You don’t remember that. I
used to come in there to listen to records, and
you were the only salesman that would let me
listen. I could stay in there for hours and I got
to listen to all these good songs.” He said, “I
was fortunate enough I had a memory and
I could go home and remember what I just
heard, because they didn’t always play those
records on the radio, and I couldn’t afford to
buy them—but you would let me listen.”

How unusual was the idea of Booker T.
& the MGs being an instrumental band,
writing their own instrumentals, and covering
songs in an instrumental fashion?
And why did that persist as an instrumental
project, by and large?

For one reason and one reason only:
Our first hit came out of a jam session.
We were waiting on an artist to come in
and do demos. He didn’t show. We were
just making time with our instruments
and goofing off and playing around. Jim
[Stewart, founder of Stax] had everything
set to record. We were playing this blues
thing and he just reached over and hit the
record button on an old Ampex 150 mono
machine. At the end, we were all just laughing,
and Jim says, “Hey, guys, you want to
come in and listen to that?” We go, “Listen
to it? You mean you recorded that?” “Yeah,
come in and listen to this. It’s pretty good.”

We were dumbfounded, because we were
really just goofing off. He said, “If we decided
to put something like this out, have you got
anything you could put on the B side?” And
I said, “Booker, you remember that thing you
played me a couple of weeks ago?” “Yeah, I
think so.” So we went out and played it, and
Jim said, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. Let’s do
that.” Three cuts later, we had Green Onions,
which became a No. 1 one record—that’s
why we were an instrumental group.

The MGs in another promo shot for McLemore Avenue. Photo courtesy of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music

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